Reading the “Key”: George Eliot and the higher criticism

Abstract

While the problem of Victorian "relativism" exists in both Darwinian and Idealist cultural discourses, it is the higher criticism of the Bible which explicitly takes human testimony and the problems of textual interpretation as its subject. Drawing on work by Strauss and Feuerbach, whom George Eliot translated, this paper argues that the formal and epistemological complexity of Middlemarch has its philosophical analogue in the discourse of the higher critics, which provides a nineteenth-century model for the understanding of narrative, testimony, and interpretive fictions.[A] man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown-known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours' false suppositions. (Middlemarch [1]) Presenting what one has understood to others is itself a production, therefore a 'text,' and so is not hermeneutics, but an object for hermeneutics. (Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts [2])